A water aerobics class at a hotel in Antalya, Turkey, built for Russian tourists to resemble the Kremlin and St. Basil’s Cathedral

ANTALYA, Turkey — Yelena Kasyanova booked her trip at a local travel agency in about as much time it takes to drop by the market for a few groceries. She was soon lounging here by the Mediterranean, a working-class anybody from an anyplace deep in Russia, a child of the Soviet era who still remembers the humiliating strictures that once made it difficult to obtain a passport, let alone a plane ticket.

A Russian family played cards recently during a vacation at the Kremlin Palace Hotel in Antalya, Turkey. The resort caters to Russians, who are visiting Turkey in growing numbers.

And all around the beach were so many just like her.

One of the most enduring changes in the lives of Russians in recent years has occurred not in Russia itself, but in places like this coastal region of Turkey, where an influx of Russian tourists has given rise to a mini-industry catering to their needs. A people who under Communism were rarely allowed to venture abroad, and then lacked money to do so when the political barriers first fell, are now seeing the world. And relishing it.

There is perhaps no better symbol of the growth in Russian tourism than the very resort where Ms. Kasyanova was staying, the Kremlin Palace Hotel, a kind of Las-Vegas-does-Moscow-by-the-shore extravaganza whose buildings are replicas of major sights at the Kremlin complex and nearby neighborhood. Why go to any old spot when you can frolic by the pool while gazing at the reassuring onion domes of a faux St. Basil’s Cathedral? (No need to bundle up against the cold, either!)

Ms. Kasyanova, 51, a health-care aide from the Kaluga region, 125 miles southwest of Moscow, has been to Egypt, Hungary and Turkey in the last few years and has Western Europe in her sights.

“It is now so easy — buy a package tour for $800, and here we are, in paradise,” said Ms. Kasyanova, who, like many Russians here, was amused by the resort’s trappings but also interested in exploring the mountains and other places nearby. “It speaks of the high standard of life in Russia, of the improvement in life in Russia.”

The Russians are coming from all over. At the local airport here, the arrivals screen was like a primer in Russian geography, with charter flights from Moscow, Rostov-on-Don in the south, Kazan in the center, Novosibirsk in Siberia and other cities in between.

A record 2.5 million Russians visited Turkey in 2007, up 33 percent from 2006, Turkish officials said. Only Germany, that paragon of European wealth, sends more tourists to Turkey. (By contrast, in 1988, a few years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, all of 22,000 Soviet citizens visited Turkey.)

The Russian tourism boom is happening as new low-cost airlines in Europe have spurred a sharp increase in tourism across the Continent. But for the Russians, the chance to travel is especially prized.

For the first time in Russian history, wide swaths of the citizenry are being exposed to life in far-off lands, helping to ease a kind of insularity and parochialism that built up in the Soviet era. Back then, the public was not only prevented from going abroad; it was also inculcated with propaganda that the Soviet Union was unquestionably the world’s best country, so there was no need to leave anyway.

The biggest struggle now for the Turkish hotels is to find enough staff members who speak Russian. Those in the tourism industry who had mastered German and English are returning to language school.

“Everybody is studying Russian now,” said Suat Esenli, a worker at the Kremlin Palace Hotel, which has more than 800 rooms and opened in 2003, just as Russian tourism began to soar. Typically, about 60 percent of the hotel’s patrons are from the former Soviet Union, with the rest from elsewhere in Europe.

Still, the effort to make Russian guests feel comfortable can go too far. For a time, one of the hotel restaurants served the sort of dishes — borscht, blinis and the like — that should have brought joy to a Russian’s heart.

The restaurant had to scrap the menu. It turned out that the last thing that the Russians wanted was the food they could get at home.

From Nytimes